4 ms·
ChatGPT had its initial public release November 30th, 2022. That's 820 days to today. The Apple II was first sold June 10, 1977, and Visicalc was first sold Oct
by mandevil 2y ago
ChatGPT had its initial public release November 30th, 2022. That's 820 days to today. The Apple II was first sold June 10, 1977, and Visicalc was first sold October 17, 1979, which is 859 days. So we're right about the same distance in time- the exact equal duration will be April 7th of this year.
Going back to the very first commercially available microcomputer, the Altair 8800 (which is not a great match, since that was sold as a kit with binary stitches, 1 byte at a time, for input, much more primitive than ChatGPT's UX), that's four years and nine months to Visicalc release. This isn't a decade long process of figuring things out, it actually tends to move real fast.
- dwaltrip 2y agoSo it’s barely been 2 years. And we’ve already seen pretty crazy progress in that time. Let’s see what a few more years brings.
- dingnuts 2y agowhat crazy progress? how much do you spend on tokens every month to witness the crazy progress that I'm not seeing? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The progress is linear at best
- jtwaleson 2y agoLarge parts of my coding are now done by Claude/Cursor. I give it high level tasks and it just does it. It is honestly incredible, and if I would have see this 2 years ago I wouldn't have believed it.
- suddenlybananas 2y agoWhat kind of coding do you do? How much of it is formulaic?
- jtwaleson 2y agoWeb app with a VueJS, Typescript frontend and a Rust backend, some Postgres functions and some reasonably complicated algorithms for parsing git history.
- Jensson 2y agoThat started long before ChatGPT though, so you need to set an earlier date then. ChatGPT came about 3 years after GPT-3, the coding assistants came much earlier than ChatGPT.
- jtwaleson 2y agoBut most of the coding assistants were glorified autocomplete. What agentic IDEs/aider/etc. can now do is definitely new.
- dialup_sounds 2y agoFor the sake of perspective: there are about ten times more paying OpenAI subscribers today than VisiCalc licenses ever sold.
- ravetcofx 2y agoIs that because anyone is finding real use for it, or is it that more and more people and companies are using it which is speeding up the rat race, and if "I" don't use it, then can't keep up with the rat race. Many companies are implementing it because it's trendy and cool and helps their valuation
- robwwilliams 2y agoI use LMMs all the time. At a bare minimum they vastly outperform standard web search. Claude is awesome at helping me think through complex text and research problems. Not even serious errors on references to major work in medical research. I still check but FDR is reasonably low—-under 0.2.
- D-Coder 2y ago> Visicalc was first sold October 17, 1979, which is 859 days. And it still can't answer simple English-language questions.
- dingnuts 2y agoit could do math reliably!
- interloxia 2y agoFrom Wikipedia: When Lotus 1-2-3 was launched in 1983,..., VisiCalc sales declined so rapidly that the company was soon insolvent.